Usually, I would relegate posts about site updates and changes to my /logs filetype, but this is a bit larger than, "changed around a few CSS modules, added a new page." For a lot of the year, I've had the website mostly running the same way, but I've taken into consideration things people have said over the past eight months, and taken some action on those criticisms. Some said that the spacing and fonts were hard to read, uncomfortable, even. Others said that my usage of Anubis was annoying, breaks the whole site, it's too much to wait on (even though, if you've got a solid connection, it should only take like ... a second). I thought about what I could do, and what I wanted to do, and I've done it.
Firstly, yes, I've switched Anubis off. Not that I don't like the software, or don't appreciate the work done on it. I think it's great! But, aside from the complaints some have given, I also find, that, when I'm trying to make new components for my site, especially components that reach outside of the site, or components that require incoming queries: They just wouldn't work, at all. It was so disruptive to what I wanted to do, I had to inject a fake HTML page into the Anubis splash page, which ... I don't think you should have to do? I think you should be allowed to edit what the page looks like.
This was especially an issue for webmentions and indieweb identifiers, which is, to me, essential to the presence of my website.
But, I didn't just turn off Anubis.
The font this site now uses is one used across many reading-specific sites, that font being, Inter. It's a little bit clearer, not as hard on the eyes, I feel. And spacing should be marginally better, as well.
To blog posts themselves, I've moved around content a little bit. Important information is now at the top, along with a brand new reading-time element, that estimates how long it might take to read what I've written. You'll also notice, as you scroll a blog post, there's an advancing glowing bar at the top of the screen. This indicates how far you are in my post. Neat, huh?
At the bottom of a post, I've created a new "back to home" button that replaces the "< home" text, and I've also removed Fediverse comments in-favor of Webmentions, which collects likes, boosts, faves, and comments from across the internet, including both Bluesky and Mastodon (I like this a bit better).
Back to the main page, the header is more like a social media profile, which is how I originally intended it to be, except now, the post count (which tallies everything I've written on the website, and everything ingested from my different accounts) auto-abbreviates, so that it never becomes such a gigantic number, and the follower and following counts are directly connected to the numbers on both my Bluesky account, and my Mastodon (social.lol) account. Yup, that means that these counts will update dynamically based on regular interaction on social media.
I've also increased the size of the buttons I have at the top of the page, so that they're a bit more legible, since it's important (to me) that visitors see them.
The blog post spot on the page now has a more "highlighted" display, so that it's immediately obvious that this is where my blog posts go, and there's something to read.
Outside of that, there are many other little changes here and there. Some coloring redone, some boxes expanded in size, and, oh yeah! All (or most) of the images on this website have been converted to .webp format.
I used to have ... not such a great opinion about the .webp format. Mostly because saving and opening a downloaded image that is a .webp is ... not a great experience. But, I then noticed (much later on) that a .webp image is significantly smaller than other image types online.
Images alone, on this site, were taking up nearly 500 megabytes of space, which is now down to just about 100. That's still a bit larger, but it's definitely a smaller number. Which is great! Because I don't feel like paying to add a volume to my server any time soon.
More things on my to-do list:
- 1: Identify anything I might've broken and haven't caught yet
- 2: Liquify an entire pizza in a glass and then drink it
- 3: Figure out how to do subscriber-only posts (and what exactly I'd even put on a "subscriber-only" type of post)
- 4: ???
- 5: South Park meme reference
- 6: Try to find more ways to actually tie my forum to the website it's right next to?
That's all. Unless I've made some kind of massive oversight, I think that's all the changes I've made in the past day and a half. Woo!
Why not test out submitting a webmention at the boottom of this post? Make a suggestion you think this webbed site could use (aside from complete deletion), thanks!
Source: https://mkultra.monster/webdev/2025/09/ ... -going-on/
